The golden age of animation reveled in absurdity. Within the heyday of the Looney Tunes, Daffy Duck would possibly get squashed and stretched, flattened like a pancake, and careen off a cliff all within the span of a minute. It’s an vitality that’s surprisingly arduous to return by in trendy video video games. Until you’re loading up Earthworm Jim on a Sega Genesis Mini or dialing the nostalgia method again with Cuphead, the elastic legacy of cartoons is difficult to return by in interactive animation.
There isn’t a scarcity of plummeting off tall objects in AAA titles, however hardly ever do trip-ups in an journey sport summon the vitality of Tex Avery or Chuck Jones (the result’s normally simply aggravating fall injury). So why don’t sport animators cartoon like they used to?
Raccoon Logic artistic director and co-founder Alex Hutchinson has requested the identical query — and his reply was to supply the funniest sport I’ve performed in ages, Revenge of the Savage Planet. To inform the story of a employee drone stranded on an alien planet, and outrunning hordes of lethal creatures, Hutchinson and the Raccoon Logic crew mixed Coyote-versus-Roadrunner antics with Tim & Eric-style satire and a gross-out sensibility match for Monty Python followers. It’s a romp with Unreal Engine polish.
“It’s at all times been fascinating to me that comedy is a large a part of movie and TV and theatre and writing however such a tiny a part of gaming, and the humor that does exist is normally within the script, which suggests we’ve been making poor males’s variations of different media,” Hutchinson advised Polygon over electronic mail. “For a sport to be humorous, the comedy must be within the gamepad, not the script.”
Picture: Raccoon Logic through Polygon
Revenge of the Savage Planet is a sequel to 2020’s Journey to the Savage Planet, a sport Hutchinson and the crew at Hurricane Studios developed for Stadia Video games. When Google shut down Stadia and Hurricane in early 2021, the core crew behind Journey to the Savage Planet regrouped to type the Montreal-based Raccoon Logic, with a watch towards reclaiming the Savage Planet mental property. Revenge isn’t extra of the identical; with a change of views from first- to third-person, Raccoon Logic has created a “contained open-world” journey that usually appears like Zelda by means of Rick & Morty (minus any motormouthed weapons).
Constructing comedy into Revenge’s DNA, as an alternative of simply lacing its dialogue with jokes, meant establishing the sport’s a number of planetary biomes and the weapon arsenal you utilize to outlive all of them with laughs in thoughts. For the crew at Raccoon Logic, that meant balancing the various platforming challenges, boss encounters, and secret-hunting missions in order that the sport was by no means irritating, however at all times stunning. The sport has numerous collectible instruments — a magnetic fork, a proton whip, a slime collector — that appear easy at first however “have bizarre penalties” as gamers delve deeper. As I charted skyscraper-sized cliffs on Stellaris Prime and grinded gentle rails throughout the lava pits of Zenithian Rift, the probabilities of tips on how to full anybody mission felt infinite in a Breath of the Wild-like method. Failing in a spectacular, splattered style was its personal enjoyable.
“We needed the participant to be lured into bizarre elements of the map, then be stunned by one thing, and hopefully get entangled in a bodily catastrophe,” Hutchinson mentioned. “We additionally by no means punish the participant excessively: if you happen to die, you drop your stuff and are reprinted from the Meat Buddy(™) organ reclaimer in your habitat, and may simply play on. If it’s too arduous it’s irritating and never humorous and folks don’t experiment. Then we needed the comfortable accidents to have an effect on creatures as properly after which the second participant to be an agent of chaos. The sensation was in that chaotic soup there’d be sufficient emergent humor to hold the sport.”
Revenge of the Savage Planet’s humor clicked for me once I first noticed my astronaut stroll round residence base. Animation director Mike Mennillo mentioned that Looney Tunes was an enormous inspiration for the character movement, however that “‘don’t go full Looney Tunes” is a phrase used quite a bit once we pushed it too far,” he mentioned. The lanky explorer’s gait is completely exaggerated, and downright extreme when working, when our hero seems to be like he would possibly go full QWOP if he journeys over the flawed alien plant. I spent quite a lot of time spinning my digital camera right into a sidescroller perspective simply to observe my man zip round like a idiot.
GIF: Raccoon Logic through Polygon
“Our artistic director mentioned usually the character can inform a joke however they can’t BE a joke,” Mennillo mentioned. “Rachet and Clank was additionally a giant inspiration — all the things moved so fluidly and I needed to emulate that. The stroll and run have been the primary two animations performed for the principle character and, as a result of everybody liked the jaunty really feel a lot, they really dictated the tone for the remainder of the sport.”
Jokes explode from each nook of Revenge of the Savage Planet. Within the sport, the hero astronaut is shipped on a colonizing mission by slimeball company Alta — then principally left to die out after a crash. All through the survival missions, Alta repeatedly spams the habitat with in-world advertisements for futuristic merchandise like meals substitute New Grob 2 and the Portal Potty, which lets you “scoot your scat to a different dimension.” The movies have been all created by “anti-mation” video director Davy Drive, who Hutchinson heralded as a “one-stop store” for producing their dystopian imaginative and prescient. I could not learn each web page of each e-book in a 70-hour RPG, however any time I died and obtained pummeled by a faux advert beamed in from Earth, I couldn’t look away.
Then there’s the goo. A lot good. Between the sport’s popping tongue-wagging critters to the variants of gushing populating the planets, Revenge of the Savage Planet has extra splatter than a Gallagher present. And the goo isn’t only for present; inexperienced goo is slippery and flammable, whereas purple goo conducts electrical energy that may be collected and sprayed out when the time is true. Completely disgusting sound results give the liquid results that chef’s kiss contact.
“Massive reactions from small participant inputs are at all times humorous, so [we wanted] plenty of exploding goo barrels and many creatures fountaining goo.” Hutchinson wrote. “We additionally took some inspiration from Ghostbusters and Males in Black and films like that, so we stuffed all of the planets with creatures which might be stuffed with goo, barf goo, explode into goo and we needed it to be extra than simply visuals, so it additionally has a systemic layer which adjustments the play house.”
The crew at Raccoon Logic makes the animated mayhem of Revenge of the Savage Planet look simple — the relentless of the gags by no means interfered with my want to truly full the missions. So why don’t we see extra video games prefer it? Hutchinson isn’t certain everybody may get away with it, even when they needed to push sport comedy that far.
“One of many joys of not having a giant mainstream writer is you don’t have to show each sturdy flavour into mush. Massive publishers are petrified of offending folks, so that they whittle off the acute edges and the sturdy flavours, and that makes video games safer and extra boring in my view. Horror and comedy are the 2 genres the place I believe you could take probably the most threat: it’s not for everybody. However if you happen to don’t push the boundaries, you then’ll make one thing for nobody.”
Revenge of the Savage Planet is at present accessible for PC, Ps, and Xbox, and it’s at present on Sport Move.